Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #27*: Where I Fail to Meet my Future Wife In a Cafeteria in Paris

She was right there! A freak conjunction of planets, far from their home solar systems! Thank goodness I didn't happen to spot her just then.

WHEN I WASN’T BANISHING MY IGNORANCE by reading what prominent dead White Guys thought, I was looking about me, in a very Herbert Pocket sort of way.

Herbert who?

Why, one of my favorite characters from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which I read that autumn in Paris, for obvious reasons: Expectations were all I had, and I wanted to curate my hopes and dreams with expert help.

Says Pip, the novel’s narrator, about his close friend Herbert: “When we gradually fell into keeping late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a desponding eye at breakfast time; that he began to look about him more hopefully at mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance rather clearly after dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at about two o’clock in the morning he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffalo…